Whatever Else Men and Women Want
by alikat522
Summary: On the first anniversary of the end, Tobias' uncle reflects. Sequel to "Whatever Else Cats and Children Need". Rated for language.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: The Animorphs and all related things belong to K.A. Applegate and Scholastic, not me. I just want to hang out in their world.

Author's Note: This piece is a sequel to "Whatever Else Cats and Children Need". This can be read alone, but for a clearer picture of how I have chosen to interpret Tobias' uncle, start with that story.

* * *

I suppose I should move back into the city. It's been about a year since those slugs blew it to kingdom come. There'll be plenty of work for someone in construction for a while, helping to get the place looking half-way normal again. You can't just snap your fingers and expect everything to be perfect again; someone's gotta put their sweat and blood into it before things get repaired.

Course, there's something else I should do back there. I'm not saying I wanna crawl back to her, I just wanna know if she's okay. Hope none of those space-men got her. I've had a year to find out, I just haven't yet. I'll get around to it, one of these days.

The house still kinda looks like it did when we were together, as few touches of flowery stuff that she didn't take with her. Not my style, but who cares, it's just a house. A place to stay when you're not working. I usually get back from work, when there is work, around four. I feed the cat right when I get back, because if I don't, I know I'm gonna wake up to claws in my face sometime around seven. Sack out on the couch for a couple of hours, crack open a few drinks and maybe take a nap. Order something to eat round eight, decide whether or not I wanna clean up and head out to a bar. But beer's cheaper in bulk, so I usually stay home. Consider calling her old number, but decide not to. I don't even know if it's still connected. If I'm in an ornery mood, I call up Sharon, and we bitch back and forth for a while, she calls me a bastard, I call her a whore, and that's that. Long distance calls are just kind of in the budget now. I pass out sometime around ten, make it to my bedroom if I feel like it, stay on the couch if I don't. Wake up in the morning when the cat won't shut up, shower, get dressed, and I'm ready to go. It's not a fancy life; I'm your basic white trash, I don't pretend to be anything else. But it's comfortable. It gets me from day to day with no fuss, and I guess if someone asked, I'd say I'm a happy guy. Or I'd say they should mind their own damn business. Either way.

But I do keep an ear out for word about him. Not that there is much floating around, not about him at least, but with the one year anniversary coming up, people are dredging it all up again. Right after it all came out, kids fighting brain slugs and space lizards and all that, a few reporters showed up at my door. I guess they dug out my address, and all the stations were paying big for anything about those kids. I slammed the door in their face; I don't need some suit sticking a microphone in my face and asking me why I raised the boy like I did. What do they know about it? Were they there? I'm not gonna talk about my personal business just to fill out their evening headline. I saw a couple of interviews with Sharon floating around, her preening to the camera and trying to make herself out to be some sort of goddamn Mother Mary, helping the fragile little orphan boy. Yeah, if she was so great, why didn't the boy go live with her afterwards? Just a thought, honey: if he chooses living in the woods eating rats over living with you, maybe you weren't such a fucking saint.

Course, he didn't go live with his mom either. She called here, once. Don't know how she got my number. She wanted to know if I had heard from him, and my first thought was that he must not have told her much about me. If he had, she woulda known he wasn't headed back here. Loren doesn't remember me, course, and in truth, I barely knew her the first time around. She was Sharon's baby sister, never really important in my mind till her kid got dropped into my lap. But I gotta admit I did feel bad for her, when she called. She sounded pretty sad over the phone.

"I just wanted to call and see if you've heard from him."

"Nope, can't say I have."

"Oh, okay. I just thought, since he lived with you for so long, he might have- anyway, if he does call or visit or anything like that, could you maybe… ask him to send a word my way? I just want to know if he's alright. I mean, I know he's not _alright_, but I-"

"Yeah, if I hear from him, I'll tell him to call you."

"I just hope he hasn't done anything…drastic. I know I wasn't able to be there for him, but he still has his friends and lots of people that care about him, and I know he loved that girl, but that doesn't mean he has to go off and-…and-"

She broke down then, and I could tell she was crying into the phone, but trying to sound like she wasn't, so I just sort of waited for a while, till she got herself together. Left me a number and address to give to him, or even for me to call if I heard anything. Can't imagine I'd ever hear anything before her, but I just kept agreeing until she finally hung up. Never been a big fan of criers. She has plenty to cry about, mind you, but doesn't mean I have to like listening to it.

Other then weird days like that, life just kinda goes on. By now, people are getting used to the whole space idea, so it's not the only thing you hear about all day. Course, the anniversary shook everything up. Everyone and their mother were trying to set up a memorial for the girl, show that they're in support of the kids. Not that they're kids anymore. Last month, the papers made a big to-do about his seventeenth birthday. Four years since I last saw him. He went off and fought a war, acted braver and stronger than most men could ever dream of. He lost it over the girl at the end, but can you blame him? He was a kid. Just a kid. And he had lost the love of his life.

I really should call Carla. They showed some maps on TV about where the damage was, and she lived right on the borderline between what got messed up and what didn't. Course, if she wanted to hear from me, she probably would have called. I'll think about it, see what feels right.

Work got called off cause of the anniversary. Some people were out in the streets with candles, wreathes and road-side crosses scattered everywhere. They didn't know the girl, who were they to cry for her? They spend the rest of their time happy as hell that they're still alive, that the Earth is still in one piece, that a bunch of kids were able to hold off doomsday, but today they all had to look sad. Me, I'm not gonna pretend. This was just one more day. I went home, fed the cat, and sacked out on the couch with a couple of beers. I even woke up at eight as usual, although I probably should have woken up at the noise earlier. I walked into the kitchen, reaching for the phone before my eyes were all the way open, but when they did open, I stopped still in my tracks.

He looked just like he did the day he left, sitting at a kitchen table like he could of just woken up for school. Different table, different house, but the same kid. Thirteen and not a day older; same hair, same face, same skinny body. The eyes were turned down, looking at the cat curled up in his lap, purring and kneading its claws into the pair of tattered up jeans. I just stood there for a minute, taking him in. The cat acknowledged me before he did, glaring at me like he always does. The boy's gaze followed the cat's, and suddenly I was looking into what seemed like the deadest pair of eyes I'd seen in years. His voice rasped when he used it, like he was so unused to the act of talking.

"You really should keep your windows shut. Birds could get in."


	2. Chapter 2

Author's Note: I had said this story would only be two chapters, but it has turned out longer than I originally expected. This is not the ending, and I am not sure how many chapters there will be. Thank you for reading.

* * *

I only met Sharon's father once, at her and my wedding. I had met her mother and sister a couple of times, but we had pushed back the wedding when they heard he was being sent home. It's not like Sharon had ever been close to him, not like Loren apparently was, but she still felt like he should be there. My mom came too, so we went through all of the meet-and-greet bullshit, shaking hands and big fake smiles. The only thing I remembered of first meeting Mr. Harper was his handshake; Sharon had warned me, but it was still pretty disconcerting shaking a hand with only two fingers and a thumb left on it. I might have flinched, but he didn't seem to notice, or at least pretended not to. And I was nervous about enough other things that I didn't even think about him again until after the ceremony, at the reception.

Sharon had glared at me when I tried to light up inside, something about not wanting her dress to smell like smoke, so I slipped out a back door into an alley, Marlboro already hanging out of my mouth. My lighter was on the fritz and it had been a long day, so I was about thirty seconds away from going back in and lighting it on a church candle when he cleared his throat. Mr. Harper was leaning back against the wall and holding out a pack of matches. I took the pack, nodded thanks, and we both stood in silence for a bit. He was looking straight ahead, burning a hole in the dumpster across the alley with his eyes, taking long drags on a Lucky Strike held between the two remaining fingers on his right hand.

After a while, he seemed to realize he should probably say something.

"So, Nick, you gonna treat my girl right?"

"Yes sir, Mr. Harper."

He didn't ask any follow up questions, didn't try to turn it into a conversation. He had asked a question, I had answered, that was it. A few more minutes passed.

"You and Sharon thinking about kids?"

"…Not really, sir."

He glanced over at me, just a look.

"You don't like kids?"

"Don't mind them, I suppose. Just don't know if I want any of my own."

He sort of nodded, a little bobbing of the head.

"Better you know that going in. Takes a lot to do right by a child. Shouldn't have one if you're not ready to give them what they need, be there for them."

I didn't know what to say; I had pretty much just told my father-in-law he wasn't getting grandkids. So we just stood there, in a kind of companionable smokers' silence. After a while, he pushed himself up from the wall, stretching as he finished off his cigarette. His eyes followed the last puff of smoke as it floated away, looking up towards the clouds as it went.

"I should head back inside. My wife didn't exactly bring me here to hang out in the back alley. Been good talking to you, Nick."

"Thank you for the matches, Mr. Harper."

He reached out to shake my hand again, and looked right at me for the first time. He smiled, but it was the kind of smile that never reaches the eyes; a smile put there because it's a time to smile, not because the person actually feels like it. And those eyes. Eyes that were open, but you ended up wishing they were closed, because you didn't want to see what was in there. You knew that you didn't want to know half of what those eyes had seen. He shook my hand, giving his dead-eyed smile.

"You're family now. Call me Toby."

-/-

-/-

Tobe never met his grandfather, at least not that I know. Sharon's dad took off a couple of months after that, hit the road and didn't look back. No one really heard from him again, but I guess it's possible that he's still alive. And maybe Tobe ran into him; life like that boy's had, you never know who he's crossed paths with. But whether or not they'd ever met, Tobe was doing a dead-on impression of his namesake, sitting there at the kitchen table. They named it wrong when they called it a thousand yard stare; that kinda look stretches on for miles and miles.

He went back to looking at the cat rubbing up against him. He wasn't smiling at it, or looking at it fondly, he was honestly just looking at it. Anyone else, and I would have asked them what the hell they were doing there, demanded an explanation for breaking into my house. I might have even done that to him, if I hadn't known what he'd spent the last four years doing. As it was, I just stood there, feeling like I'd walked into someone else's space. Finally, he broke the silence again.

"Do you have anything to eat?"

By some random chance, I had bread, ham andcheese all in the house. It probably says something about how I raised him that he was surprised. It definitely says something about me that I was surprised. I threw together two sandwiches, slid one over to him, and sat down to one of the strangest meals I've ever eaten. I opened a beer for myself, silently offered him one, and put it back in the fridge when he just stared at me.

I had always thought I'd have something to say to him when he came back. I thought I might yell at him for taking off, apologize for making him want to, tell him he was stupid for leaving a decent home, tell him I was proud of him for taking the step. But now, with the boy in front of me, I had nothing to say.

But someone else did. I dug through some paper and trash on the table till I found Loren's number, and handed it to him. He only glanced up from his food, immediately going back to wolfing it down, so I set it on the table in front of him.

"She wants to hear from you."

He swallowed a big bite, picked up the paper and stared at it. He took it in for a while, then set it back down in the mess. When he spoke up, it was in a quiet voice, quiet, but firm and direct.

"How come you never told me about her, what happened to her? Aunt Sharon had stories, but she did about everything. Why didn't you tell me anything about her?"

Finally, something I had an answer for.

"You really think a little boy wants to be told he's been forgotten?"

"Bullshit. I was thirteen by the time I left, I could have handled it. And what, you think I preferred imagining she just took off?"

"Well, lucky her, she doesn't have to imagine; her son _did_ just take off."

That shut him up quick enough. He stared down at the empty plate and I wondered just how often he got to eat, with the life he chose. But he didn't ask for anything else, so we both just sat there, trying not to think about the things we had every reason to be ashamed of.

"I had to leave. I needed to be gone for a while. Get some space. Loren would have wanted me to stay around, stay human. I can't do that."

"Then why are you here?"

He laughed, a small snort of a laugh that looked incredibly out of place on a still face. But when he talked, there was no joy in his voice.

"Honestly? I was gonna come bash your face in."

"…You're a man now. I'll give you one free shot. After that, anyone's game."

He snorted again, sort of shook his head, like I had said something funny, like I was some kind of kid. Went back to petting his cat.

"No thanks, not really in the mood anymore."


End file.
